Recently in Design

I'm slicing and dicing my way through melons as if my life depends on it, every twitch of my finger dispatching another pile of soft fruit. This is Fruit Ninja as it has never been played before - using the Leap, the much-hyped gestural control device made by start-up firm Leap Motion that is set to launch worldwide in March.

Are you one of those people that, as soon as they are get a new plant, it is merely a matter of time before the poor thing is just a sad, dried mass of shrivelled leaves? Then a new gadget called Flower Power, unveiled at the International CES trade show in Las Vegas, Nevada yesterday, could be just the thing to help you pretend your fingers really are green.

Developed by Parrot, the French firm that brought us the quad-rotor AR drone, Flower Power is a Bluetooth-enabled stick that you simply shove in the soil with your plant, after having chosen from a list of around 6000 plants which one you are trying not to kill. Sensors in the stick monitor the moisture in the soil, sunlight and whether you need to add any more fertiliser and then send that info via a low-powered version of Bluetooth to the cloud. It's meant to keep on sending data for up to six months before needing a battery change.

The data is analysed and compared with set parameters for the particular type of plant. "We think of it as putting your garden on the internet," says Henri Seydoux, Parrot's CEO. The stick and accompanying Android app are due to be released later this year.

The app displays all the info you need about your plant and flags up areas of concern using colour-coded warning signs, telling you when your beloved bit of flora needs a top up. Graphs show you how they are all faring. In theory, it will leave little excuse for killing that plant that was given to you by your friendly neighbour. In practice, I probably still will. But at least I'll know why this time.

Ever idly wondered what your kitten would look like if it had
your hairstyle? Or what your living room would look like
with a tiger-print shag-pile carpet? An augmented reality app will one day let you visualise such things on tablets or phones in an interesting way: you'll simply "pinch" the texture you want from an image on a
touchscreen and paste it onto a photo of the target.

The touchscreens on tablets and smartphones make the devices easy for one person to interact with, but what happens when there is more than one user?

Touchscreens can't tell your fingers from anyone else's, but that's set to change, as a team of researchers led by Chris Harrison at the Disney Research Institute in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania have built a system which distinguishes user inputs using the body's electrical profile. The technique, which the team call "capacitive fingerprinting" was presented by Harrison at the UIST conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts this week.

The system works by sending multiple frequencies of a weak electrical current through a user's finger when they first touch a device. Different frequencies take different paths to the ground through the human body, and the team's prototype measures the path each frequency takes, building up an electrical profile that is unique to the user (see video). Each user's interaction with the touchscreen is then assigned to their profile. The system builds on Disney's Touche system, which lets everyday objects detect touch gestures.

Harrison envisions tablets that allow multiple people to use a touchscreen simultaneously, primarily to play games or for activities like painting. Two-player tablet games do exist, but they use a split screen to allow separate input. The team - which includes researchers from Disney Research and the University of Tokyo - built a two-player tablet version of whack-a-mole that allows either player to whack moles anywhere on the screen, while the computer keeps track of each user's score.

Although the system can distinguish between touchscreen users, Harrison says that the body's electrical signature is not precise enough to be used as a biometric to provide secure access to a device. Wearing a different pair of shoes changes the body's electrical signal, for example, since the flow of current to the ground is changed. This causes anyone's electrical signal to fluctuate too much to be useful for personal identification.

One day "intelligent" passenger aircraft will cruise across oceans in low-drag, energy-saving formations, like flocks of geese. So said European plane-maker Airbus at its annual technology look-ahead conference last night. It's a striking idea that media outlets lapped up.

Warming to its theme, Airbus added that emissions could be cut by using a superfast ground vehicle to catapult future aircraft into the air, so that it reaches cruising speed and altitude faster. And it could land with the engines switched off, in a long, controlled "free glide" to the runway.

But how will this stuff actually work? With computers, of course. "Highly intelligent aircraft would be able to
self organise and select the most efficient and environmentally friendly
routes," says Airbus.

This cosy picture of aviation circa 2050 glosses over the degree to which computers will have to assume control of the finer manoeuvres of such planes, rather than pilots. Close-quarters formation flying involves navigating with very little vertical separation. When a decade ago aircraft began flying across the Atlantic with only
1000 feet (305 metres) of vertical separation, rather than the previous 2000 feet, there was an outcry over the safety implications. The room for error is minimal at subsonic cruising speeds.

Human knitters don't need to think much about damping, friction or many of the other physical properties of how strands of yarn interact: they just get on with it. But that's exactly how computer-simulated knitting from researchers at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, works. It uses these parameters to build a model of the complex interactions within wool to build eye-popping simulations of items like sweaters, a woolly hat or a tea cosy (see video).

Typically, computer-drawn clothing is modelled on flat, uniform elastic sheets. This works fine for woven materials, but begins to look "rubbery" if the model is stretched as much as knitted clothing does naturally.

Simulations which take the physical properties of each loop of wool into account can avoid this. But building a virtual garment by manually defining every interaction between every thread would be too time-consuming to be practical.

To solve this problem, Steve Marschner and colleagues from Cornell, from the University of Utah, Salt Lake City, and from Facebook have developed a method of simulating knitted clothing that breaks each garment up into a series of polygons. A knitting pattern is cut to fit into each polygon, and then tiled in a repeating fashion across the whole garment.

The researchers suggest that their technique will be useful to the design community, allowing the creation of strikingly convincing textiles for use in animated films or online shopping outlets.